The prevalent and pernicious custom of tasking the minds and confining the bodies of children for hours in succession at home and in schools, at a time of life when the growth of the body and the welfare of the system require constant and playful exercise in the open air, and perfect freedom from care and excitement of mind, is the fruitful source of much future bad health, and is eminently calculated to defeat the object aimed at by parents, namely, the mental excellence of the child. The premature exertion of intellect to which it is stimulated by the constant excitement of emulation and vanity, far from strengthening, tends to impair the health and tone of the brain, and of all the organs depending on it; and hence we rarely perceive the genius of the school manifesting in future years any of the superiority which attracted attention in early life; but we find him, on the contrary, either sunk below mediocrity, or dragging out a painful existence, the victim of indigestion and melancholy. On the other hand, some of the most distinguished men who ever lived were in childhood remarkable only for health, idleness, and apparent stupidity. The illustrious Newton was, by his own account, an idle and inattentive boy, and “very low in the school,” till he reached twelve years of age; and the young Napoleon himself is described as “having good health, and being in other respects like other boys.” Adam Clarke was considered “a grievous dunce” when a boy, and was seldom praised by his father, except for his ability _in rolling large stones_, which his robust frame and good health enabled him to do. Shakspeare, Gibbon, Byron, Scott, and Davy, were in like manner undistinguished for precocious genius, and were fortunately allowed to indulge freely in those wholesome bodily exercises, and that freedom of mind, which contributed so much to their future excellence. The mother of Sheridan, too, long regarded him as “the dullest and most hopeless of her sons.” Among the many who give great promise in early life, and whose talents are then forced by ill-judged cultivation into precocious maturity, how few live to manhood to reap the reward of their exertions, and how few of those who survive preserve their superiority unimpaired! Tasso was early distinguished, and wrote his immortal epic at twenty-two years of age, but his life was miserable and his reason disordered, and he died at fifty-one. Pascal is another example of the same result, and Kirke White and many others might be named were it necessary.[49]